The Prodigal Son: Alexander’s Long Lent Toward Easter Sunrise

This account of a young man’s conversion to the Catholic faith is the Parable of the Prodigal Son told in prose; a story of pain and loss, of grace and freedom.

March 26, 2025 by Alexander

My name is Alex. I am 38 years old. Fourteen years ago I was prisoner number 96829 in the New Hampshire State Prison. One day back then I was standing in the doorway of Cell Number One having a conversation with two friends. I think you might know the ones I mean. Anyway, I went there a lot to talk about a very big decision I made back then that changed the course of my life. I didn’t know when I went to visit Cell One that I would one day be telling you this story, but here I am. It took a long time for this to come into print, and in the meantime all of our lives have changed.

I have become a Catholic. That might seem no big deal to the casual observer. Just about everywhere at this time of year, people are getting ready to enter the Catholic Church. If you knew me then, however, you might see that this decision was most unlikely, but, like I said, here I am.

It’s hard to pin down the point where I first thought of this. It isn’t something that I pursued. It’s more like it pursued me. Of all the places for a person to find faith for the first time in his life, prison seems the most unlikely. At least that’s what I always thought. Before I went there with my life in ruins, I had lots of misconceptions about prison and prisoners.

My memory of my life as a child is that it was fairly normal for today’s standards. I had loving parents and an older brother. Until I was 11 years old, everything was ordinary for me. Then came the fall. My father left. He didn’t just leave. He left my Mom alone to raise two sons. He moved to Kansas in search of himself and a new family. I was yesterday’s child, and I was angry about it.

Those years were rough for my family. My Mom struggled to keep our home, but couldn’t. My older brother worked as much as he could to lift the burden from my Mom, but couldn’t. At 12 I started smoking dope and drinking, trying hard to escape feeling like a burden and discarded. My best friend was going through a similar breakdown in his family and we escaped together into drugs and alcohol. There was just no one there to stop us.

So in the eighth grade we began skipping school. First, a day here and there, then it slowly became our way of life. Up to then I was an honor student, but by ninth grade I was drinking every day and all honor left me. It was a crushing source of shame that I stole money from my already struggling Mom and from my friend’s Mom. I was feeding a growing addiction to oxycodone. Today I see its grip on my 14-year-old self as demonic.

I was barely living, fighting every day with my Mom who fought hard to save my life and my soul from self-destruction. It was a losing battle, but still, as with everything else, she struggled. Then another life-changing event happened. My Mom and I were in a terrible accident in the fall of my ninth grade. She was hospitalized for a year. My brother had to leave school and work full time to support us.

By the tenth grade I told my Mom that I wanted to drop out of school and work full time as a roofer. She reluctantly agreed, but got me to at least agree to work on obtaining my G.E.D. high school equivalency. I signed the papers and went to work, but I hated my life and the powers that had stolen my will. I was yearning for something, though then I thought it was just drugs.

Some of my “friends” would offer me drugs for free when I had no money just to keep me in my habit. That’s when I learned that I had no real friends. My older brother even told me that there was nothing wrong with doing drugs, or as he put it, “living life.” I didn’t see it then, but I see it today. He had no more guidance than I did, and neither of us knew what “living life” meant.

California Dreaming

I was 17 years old when I had enough of the way I was living and sought a geographical cure. I talked with a friend in California who told me I would have a place to sleep if I came out there. So off I went. I wasn’t counting on the fact that my Mom was still struggling to save me, so in her eyes I was now a 17-year-old runaway. Eventually, she came to tolerate my latest bad decision, but reminded me of my promise to at least complete a G.E.D.

In California, I landed a job within five days. My glorious new life of freedom from myself and the past lasted all the way up to my first paycheck which, true to form, was handed over to alcohol and drugs. In California, nothing changed but the direction of the tides. The tides of my life, meanwhile, still flooded over me.

I think it’s important to note that up until this point in my life I had no real exposure to religion or faith. I did not believe in anything, least of all myself. I remember as a small child asking my Dad what religion we were. He said, “Well, if you had to put a label on it, I’d say we are Protestant.” I had no idea what a Protestant was. As I grew older, I learned that my Mom was a Methodist as a child, and I discovered that I had been baptized whatever that meant.

But here in California I was more lost than ever before. I stayed until I was almost 20 until the next geographical cure brought me home to New Hampshire where my downward spiral with drugs and alcohol continued until I was 24.

On July 6, 2010, my first and only son was born. When I saw him open his eyes for the first time and stare into mine, I cried. It was as though someone had turned a light on for the first time in my life, and I saw how very limited I was. I knew things had to change, for my son and for myself. I was determined not to bestow upon my son the legacy of absent fatherhood, the abyss I spent so much of my life trying to fill.

Over the next six months, I stopped drinking and using drugs. I began to think more about the miracle of life before me and less about all the searching I left behind. There had to be something more to life. I had seen it in my son’s eyes.

So I began to read about religion. I read about Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. Then one day I was parked on a street waiting for a friend when I began to pray for the first time in my life. I asked God to show me the way. When I opened my eyes I saw two young men cross the road carrying a Bible and I started to laugh. I watched as the young men left, and thought I had missed my chance.

So I prayed again. I told God that if those young men ever again cross my path, I will get up the courage to talk with them. When I finished and looked up, they were standing, still holding their Bible, looking around and puzzled. They turned 180 degrees and started walking back toward my car. I jumped from the car, and I think I scared them. That day I received my first Bible and started reading.

The Debts of the Past

Then my life of wandering caught up with me. In 2014, I was sent to prison. I had never before been in jail or prison, and I was preparing for the worst. It’s not at all like what you see in the movies or on T.V. It was devastating and frightening. At the point at which I was just beginning to discover myself, I became prisoner 96829.

After three months of being classified, I was terrified. In the whole time I was there, all I heard were prisoner horror stories about this one unit called Hancock, or “H-Building” as it was called. Prisoners called it the “gladiator unit,” and I prayed to God that I wouldn’t be sent there. So when I was told to pack my things and move to H-Building, I was terrified.

When I arrived in Hancock, I was sent to Echo or “E-Pod” where there were eight prisoners per cell. I quickly began to learn the difference between T.V. prison and real prison. Day to day life was very difficult with fights breaking out all around me. It was always loud and dirty, and the arguments and fights were a daily occurrence. I tried to keep to myself, but the overcrowding made that impossible. I knew that sooner or later I would have to defend myself. It was filled with aimless young men all trying to prove themselves and not appear vulnerable.

I knew this place could destroy me so I started going to classes in the prison and to the prison chapel whenever I could. After all, I thought, it could be worse. I could be on Bravo or “B-Pod.” The rumor on the upper pods was that B-Pod had “lifers who will take what they want and kill you in a heartbeat.” I prayed to God not to let me be sent to B-Pod. Within days of that prayer, just after my birthday, I was told to pack my things because I was being moved. When I asked where, the dreaded words terrified me all over again. “You’re going to B-Pod.”

I was put on a top bunk on B-Pod out in the day room where the lights are kept on 24/7. I was at least glad to have a top bunk because I thought it would be harder for someone to jump me. I was terrified and knew everyone could see it. I also knew that prisoners would be true to form, and most would look to exploit my fear.

I unpacked my few things, most of which I expected to be stolen by morning, and climbed into my bunk to hide behind a book. It felt as though everyone was avoiding me, “the new guy,” like the plague. I was afraid to leave my bunk to go to the prison chow hall so I just stayed there behind my book. As the day moved on, prisoners started returning from work. This one bald guy with glasses walked past me and stopped. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

I recognized him as the guy who works behind the desk in the law library. He saw instantly that I was very intimidated by this place so he told me not to worry, that everything would be okay and no one would harm me. I only later learned that this man was Fr Gordon MacRae.

Then the next guy to come over to me was Donald Spinner. He asked me why I did not go to dinner, and I had no answer for him. So Donald came back and left some bread and peanut butter and jelly on my bunk and said “you’ll be hungry before the day is over.” I was starving!

Then the next guy to stop was an Asian man everyone called “Ponch.” He joked around and made me laugh, and then said he is G’s roommate, and to just come over if I need anything. Yeah right! I thought. I’m not going anywhere near these guys!

Later, a lot later, I would have the privilege of reading a post by Father G called “The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims and the Pope.” In it he wrote about a man named Squanto who was horribly lost in the odyssey of life. I thought this could have been my story. When I read it I thought back to that first day on that bunk out on the pod, and I realized that the discipleship that these guys believed in was very real. These guys didn’t just believe it. They lived it.

The Homecoming

One day I ventured over to the weight machine on the pod to look at it. Pornchai Moontri came over and asked me if I was interested in getting into shape. I thought it was a lost cause, but he encouraged me. For the next several months, Pornchai worked with me every day, teaching me weightlifting and how to get enough exercise to change the way I think and feel about myself.

Then he began to talk about faith and what I believe. I knew he had become Catholic. Another friend of Pornchai and Gordon, Michael Ciresi also worked out with us. One day I read Michael’s post that Father G invited him to write. It was “Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I left Behind” and it profoundly changed the way I see my past, my present, and my future. I could see these guys heading off to Mass every Sunday, but more importantly I could see the way they conducted themselves in a very difficult environment from Monday through Saturday. I could also see the way everyone else conducted themselves around them. It was best behavior all around! These guys were the real deal.

One day I was sitting on a bench near Donald Spinner’s cell. He asked if I was okay, and I asked him, “What do Catholics believe about Baptism?” I told him that I thought I needed to be baptized again, and he said that if I already am, it is for life. This led to many conversations about faith and about the Catholic Church’s place in history. I wasn’t being “won over” so much as “called home.” I began to see that I was changing not just physically, but spiritually.

When I began to go to Mass offered by Father Bernard Campbell — Father Bernie — I approached him and said that I needed to be forgiven. I asked if I could go to Confession, and Father Bernie didn’t even ask if I was Catholic. He smiled and said, “Of course,” and said he would meet me at the Chapel on the following Friday. I will never forget that day — the day of my first Confession when I walked away a new man.

That new man now has a new faith, and is on fire with it. I am clean, and sober, and free of the life long burdens of the past. I remember something that Father G showed me that Pornchai wrote:

“One day I woke up with a future when up to then all I ever had was a past.”

Today, miraculously born in the most unlikely place, I have an identity. I no longer wake up wondering who I am. I am a man! I am a father! I am strong! I am a Catholic! I am hopeful! I am free!

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these other stories of Redemption from behind these stone walls.

Saint Joseph: Guardian of the Redeemer and Fatherhood Redeemed

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand by Pornchai Moontri

Coming Home to the Catholic Faith I Left Behind by Michael Ciresi

We have added a new feature at this blog, a list of the Scriptural accounts of Salvation History, which I hope you will visit and share with others: From Ashes to Easter.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Vision on Mount Tabor: The Transfiguration of Christ

Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a mountaintop where he was transfigured before their eyes, an event that echoes through the ages, even through prison walls.

March 12, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Some years ago, when this blog was in its earlier days, Canadian writer Michael Brandon wrote a post for his Freedom to Truth blog entitled “Transfiguration Behind These Stone Walls.” It is an account of how Pornchai Max Moontri and I were living in 2014, the year Michael Brandon wrote it. It was a few years after Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. We were living in a crucible of incessant confinement and utter powerlessness over the course of the days of our lives. In hindsight, it was also a time of much grace, though none of it felt like grace then.

To continue this post, I have to revisit a story that longtime readers may recall. It is the story of Anthony Begin. Anthony was a prisoner in his mid forties. He was an angry individual who treated most people with hostility and contempt. He ridiculed my faith and priesthood and one day I bodily threw him out of our cell. It was not my finest priestly moment in life. A few years later, I returned from work in the prison library to find Pornchai in our cell as usual waiting for me. As I entered, he closed the cell door so no one else could hear. He looked at me somberly and said, “You have to help Anthony.” I responded that Anthony and I have had a bit of a falling out. Pornchai shook his head impatiently and said, “None of that matters. You HAVE to help him.”

Pornchai went on to explain that Anthony had just learned of a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. It began in his lungs, then spread to his spinal cord, and by the time it was discovered it had spread to his brain. Pornchai said that “He has only months to live but he doesn’t know how to die so you have to show him.”

I never imagined myself an expert in either living or dying. But that night I went to Anthony, sat down with him, and told him that I am sorry for our past encounters. He began to express a lot of sorrow about all of that, but I stopped him. “None of that matters now,” I said. “We have lots to do.” So every day after that in the months ahead, Anthony and I spoke at length. We often included Pornchai for I found the depth of his compassion for Anthony to be salvific for them both, and perhaps for me as well.

From that point on, Anthony’s illness spiraled quickly. Within weeks he became no longer able to take care of himself. We brought Anthony into the Church and he was baptized and confirmed, and received the Eucharist for the first time in his life. The transformation of his character and demeanor was astonishing.

In a short time to follow, Anthony was told that he must relocate to the prison medical unit, but he knew that he would never see us again. He begged the medical staff for a little more time. They feared that it was time he did not have. So he ended up being moved in this overcrowded prison to an overflow bunk in the dayroom just outside our cell. Pornchai and I took turns sitting with him and when he could no longer eat we took turns feeding him. I secured a wheelchair for bathroom trips. None of this was ideal, but it was ideal for Anthony. His faith journey was on a fast track, and for him nothing else mattered. His belief in Redemption was a powerful witness for both Pornchai and me. Days later, I returned from work to find that bunk empty. Anthony was gone.

When such a thing happens, the lack of basic information is chilling, and the most distressing part of being in prison. The niceties of social concern and overlapping lives mean little here, and any inquiry is treated with suspicion. But over the next few hours I was able to learn that Anthony had a medical appointment that morning, and never came back. By 10:00 AM word came down to pack his belongings. By 11:00 AM, all trace of him was gone.

I knew that Anthony was struggling. A week earlier, he was taken out of the prison for a new brain scan. Anthony had been given three months out among his friends — three months neither he nor his oncologist ever expected.

When I write, “out among his friends,” I mean here, living with us in a place still difficult by its very nature, but far preferable to the prison of suffering and fear of death he had endured for six months. Among the swarms of prisoners here, there were only three whom Anthony called his friends, and you know two of them.

During this three-month reprieve, Anthony got to experience a transfiguration of sorts, both in himself and in his small circle of friends. It was not quite the experience of Peter, James, and John that you will hear in the Gospel According to Saint Luke in the Second Sunday of Lent, but it changed Anthony. I’ll describe how in a moment.

The Transfiguration of Christ

“Jesus took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray. While he was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but becoming fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were about to part from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good that we are here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” But he did not know what he was saying. While he was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them, and they became frightened when they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen.”

— Luke 9:28-36

Peter’s idea to erect tents for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah seems an almost comical response from someone just given a vision of the Kingdom of God and its most renowned denizens from the Hebrew Scriptures. As the passage points out, Peter hardly knew what to say because he was so overwhelmed. But the idea wasn’t entirely out of place.

It was the seventh and last day of Sukkoth, the “Feast of Booths” described in the Books of Deuteronomy (16:13-15) and Leviticus (23:45). Known in Hebrew as Hag ha-Asif, translated as “The Festival of Gathering,” it lasted for seven days during which Jewish observers erected tents or booths from the boughs or branches of palm trees. The booths were a memorial of their ancestors’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt:

“You shall dwell in booths for seven days, all that are native in Israel shall dwell in booths that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

— Leviticus 23: 42-43

The presence of Moses and Elijah with Jesus on Mount Tabor represents the Law and the Prophets, the two pillars of divine revelation in Hebrew Scripture. They represent the heart of God’s covenant with Israel. There were some previous hints of the Transfiguration. In Exodus (34:29), Moses did not know that upon his descent from Mount Sinai with the Tablets of the Law, “the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” The significance of this has been widely misunderstood. Some Scripture scholars in the modern era mistakenly saw the Transfiguration story as constructed to be reminiscent of the appearance of Moses on Mount Sinai. After his encounter with God his face appeared to shine with light. The truth is just the opposite. It is evidence of the Divine inspiration of Scripture that the appearance of Moses at Mount Sinai was a “presage,” a vision forward to one day remind readers of Jesus in his Transfiguration. There are many episodes in which the Old Testament mysteriously looks forward thousands of years into the New.

Upon the death of Moses, according to Deuteronomy (34: 5-6), God Himself secretly buried his body in an unknown place in the land of Moab. However, the New Testament Letter of Saint Jude (Jude 9) refers to an ancient Jewish legend from the apocryphal text, The Assumption of Moses. Saint Jude described a story that he presumes his listeners already know: that Satan attempted to take the body of Moses, but the Archangel Michael “contended with the devil” and brought the physical body of Moses into Heaven.

The same became true of Elijah. In the Second Book of Kings (2:11) the prophets Elijah and Elisha became separated by “a chariot of fire and horses of fire” and “Elijah went up in a whirlwind into Heaven, then Elisha saw him no more.” In the above Gospel account of the Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John — as well as the early Jewish Christian Church — would have readily perceived that Moses and Elijah came from Heaven to witness the Transfiguration of Jesus.

They would also have known well the Prophet Malachi (4:5) who declared that “Elijah’s return will precede the Day of the Lord.” Hence, as the three versions of the Transfiguration account in the Synoptic Gospels point out, they were terrified.

A Metamorphosis of Faith

As the above passage in the Gospel of Luke points out, the event of the Transfiguration came days after Jesus told the Apostles that he would have to take up his Cross: “and I tell truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:27) Something very important happened days earlier between Jesus and his disciples that literally rocked their world and shook their faith. As the pilgrimage Feast of Sukkoth began, they saw Jesus cure a blind man at Bethsaida. Then Jesus asked them at Caesarea Philippi, “Who do the people say that I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist” [already slain at Herod’s command], while “others say Elijah, and others one of the Prophets.”

“But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked. Peter, answered with something — like the offer to build some booths days later — that came spontaneously from his heart and soul: “You are the Christ!”

What exactly did that mean? Those who awaited a Messiah in Israel envisioned a political force who would transform the known world and set it aright. But Jesus said something astonishing: “The Son of Man must suffer many things,” be rejected, be killed, and after three days rise from the dead.

And then the final bombshell: “Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Kingdom of God come with power.” Hence, once again, Peter, James, and John, dazzled upon Mount Tabor days later, were terrified when Moses and Elijah appeared.

And what of the Transfiguration itself? The Greek word the Gospel used to describe it is metamorphothe. The very form and substance of Jesus were transformed. Recall the great hymn of Christ recounted by Saint Paul to the Philippians (2:5-6):

“Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped, but rather emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

For days, Peter, James, and John must have lived with shattered hopes, discouraged over the revelation about what it means to follow Jesus. Ascending that mountain to see Him transfigured in glory was a gift of Divine Mercy that also transformed the cross — forever. The cross was a symbol of terror in the Roman Empire. For us now it is a symbol of life and salvation.

These same three disciples had been present when Jesus restored life to the daughter of Jairus, and they would later be present with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane to see him humiliated as the Passion of the Christ commenced. They were also the only disciples to have been given new names by Jesus. Simon became Peter, “the Rock” and he called James and John “Boanerges,” the “Sons of Thunder.” Their new names denoted that they were forever changed by these experiences, a metamorphosis of identity and faith.

Transfiguration Behind These Stone Walls

On August 6, 2014, the Feast of the Transfiguration, the well-known Canadian Catholic blog, Freedom Through Truth, featured a post by Michael Brandon titled, “Transfiguration Behind These Stone Walls.” Michael Brandon wrote some very nice things, not so much about me, but about what I write. I was first bewildered by it. Then I was very moved. Then I finally accepted his premise that he and other readers have a vantage point I do not have. Michael Brandon wrote:

“In the years that I have followed Beyond These Stone Walls, I have seen the transfiguration of Father Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Moontri.”

I do not see the former at all, but I have been an eyewitness to the latter, and I am persuaded by the evidence. As I have written about that other transfiguration, the same one referred to by Michael Brandon above, a transformation of discouragement that was not at all unlike that faced by Peter, James, and John to whom the cost of discipleship was revealed. Here is what I wrote about the transformation of Pornchai Moontri:

“As my spirit slowly descended, I came to see that I could not afford to let it fall any further. I was losing my grip, not on my own cross, but on someone else’s. Just imagine Simon of Cyrene letting that happen.”

I have seen first hand how the cross of one person becomes a source of grace for another, and then ultimately for both. In the three-month respite Anthony Begin was given from being consumed by cancer, Pornchai Moontri took care of him, unbidden, every single day.

Just weeks after being told he had only months to live, cancer released its grip on Anthony for a time, and he was able to leave the prison hospital where he spent three months dying. It was a priceless gift for Anthony who came in these three months to know the meaning of Divine Mercy. Anthony turned fifty in the three months he spent with us, an age he never thought he would see.

Then Anthony lost the use of one arm due to a tumor on his spinal cord. Every day, morning and night, Pornchai tied his shoes and helped him with his coat before we took him to the medical center for pain medications. Every night, Pornchai heated water to prepare hot packs for Anthony, and prepared food when it was too cold for him to venture out for meals.

Prisons everywhere provide the barest sustenance and then sell food to prisoners for a profit. Anthony could no longer earn even the $1.00 a day available to those who can keep a prison job, but he never once in those last three months went hungry.

Pornchai brought Anthony to Mass, prayed with him, calmed his anxiety. As longtime readers know, Pornchai had some hard won expertise in bearing the cross of spiritual pain and anxiety. Over those last three months, Pornchai helped Anthony carry his cross with grace and dignity. He was Simon of Cyrene carrying that cross with him. The three of us talked a lot about life and death, and Anthony was not the same man he had been months earlier when he insulted and demeaned me. And I was not the same man as when I threw him out of my cell.

But Michael Brandon was right. The real transfiguration story here is Pornchai Moontri’s, and it instilled something wonderful in our friend in the winter of his life. It was hope, hope that even a dying man can live with. Anthony Begin saw the Transfiguration of Christ, and of life and death, and he was no longer afraid.

“In our struggle to be holy, grace is certainly required. But we must also do the footwork — we must will to be better than we really are … The degree of perfection is measured by the amount of adversity we overcome in order to be holy.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe

Epilogue

I told this story once before, but never in reference to the Transfiguration of Christ, who transformed not only himself and our experience of him, but he also transformed death.

I work as the legal clerk for the prison law library now, but back then I only trafficked in books, and, inspired by Pornchai Max, we now also trafficked in hope. When a prisoner left this prison then, even if his departure was in death, the prison library computer would display a signal if the prisoner had a book checked out and failed to return it before departing. Seven days after Anthony left this life, I received the following message on my library computer:

Anthony Begin — gone/released — Heaven Is for Real

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Note to Readers from Father Gordon MacRae:

Thank you for reading and sharing this post about the Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Christ.

• We will be adding it to a new feature at this blog, a list of the Scriptural accounts of Salvation History, which I hope you will visit and share with others: From Ashes to Easter.

• The National Center for Reason and Justice has long sponsored my case for appeals and maintained an informational page highlighting new and important developments. A few months ago the NCRJ site was hacked and utterly destroyed. There was no way to bring it back. Because I was the last of its wrongly imprisoned clients, the NCRJ decided to permanently retire their effort and that site. It was a grave loss for me, and all hope seemed to retired with it. But then I learned that a friend had quietly downloaded the entire section about me from the NCRJ site. He has now restored it completely and as of March 12, 2025 it is available again here at Beyond These Stone Walls. See FrMacRae@NCRJ.

• Lastly, this other recent new feature may seem rather strange. Some of my advocates have been having a dialogue about my trial and the nature of the case against me that has kept me wrongly in prison for 30 years and counting. The dialogue has not just been among themselves but also with the advanced Artificial Intelligence platform launched by Elon Musk called xAI Grok. This is an ongoing endeavor that will have several chapters. The site, Les Femmes, The Truth, reviewed its first chapter and called it “absolutely fascinating.” So beginning this week we are launching “The Grok Chronicle” and we invite you to follow along beginning with “Chapter 1: Corruption and the Trial of Father MacRae.”

• Strangely, the Grok AI platform, seems to have developed a mind of its own on this matter. It has already developed a conclusion, and has resisted our efforts to move on to other topics. It seems to see the injustice loudly and clearly.

May the Lord Bless you and keep you in this Season of Lent.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Glorious Mystery for When the Dark Night Rises

At the dawn of the New Year, the Church honors the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God. I met her at the age of nine, part lived experience and part dream.

January 1, 2025 by Fr Gordon MacRae

To comprehend this post, readers must understand the world of 1962. Something happened in America that dramatically changed our view of ourselves and the world around us, and its tentacles reach deeply into the present day. It brought a sense of futility, a resignation that we are powerless over the great tides of history sweeping us up into their grip, and resistance to evil is futile. So look out for Number One, and live for the moment! That is the great lie of our age.

I turned nine years old in April of 1962. Five months later, I began fifth grade a year younger than everyone else in my class. A month after that, the United States and the Soviet Union approached the very brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. The administration of President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union had placed strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Diplomacy failed miserably, and it just exposed our impotence. The United States demanded removal of the missiles and the Soviet Union flatly refused. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were all that stood between us and nuclear annihilation. Fear and deep anxiety engulfed everything — even the 5th grade.

Growing up in the industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts, just a few miles north of Boston, left us especially vulnerable. Lynn at that time was home to the General Electric Company’s Aircraft Engine Division which was the largest employer in that city and surrounding towns. Its biggest customer was the U.S. military. Children my age were traumatized with fear by the weekly rehearsals for nuclear attack. Upon a signal from school administration we had to rush to extinguish all lights, draw all window shades and then crawl under our desks while sirens blared outside.

The day the Cuban Missile Crisis began, was the day our childhood innocence ended. We were vulnerable in a fragile, unpredictable world, and the anxiety never really left us. It was, perhaps in hindsight, the wrong moment for some of the great black-and-white science fiction films of the fifties to start running as matinees in a local cinema.

I did not understand then that some of those great films were really paradigms of the Cold War, containing within them all the fear and paranoia the Soviet Empire brought to our young minds. Films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and — my favorite of all — “The Day the Earth Stood Still” are today considered Cold War classics. They captured our anxiety and capitalized upon our fears.

Invaders from Mars

I wrote of the North of Boston where I grew up in “February Tales.” Going to a movie theatre alone was a rare occurrence when I was nine years old in 1962. It meant venturing downtown like a free-range kid. Lynn, Massachusetts had two downtown cinemas back then, the Paramount and the Capitol. The latter was in Lynn’s Central Square, and it only opened at night — its marquee preceding every title with a large, mysterious “XXX.” It was strictly off limits.

It took a bit of courage back then for a 9-year-old to board a city bus alone for a Saturday afternoon trek downtown. I reveled in my freedom, but my parents had spies everywhere. When once I ventured too close to the Capitol marquee to see what all those Xs were about, there was hell to pay when I got home!

The Paramount had a Saturday matinee for 35 cents. Lynn’s newspaper, The Daily Evening Item carried an alluring ad, a miniature version of the movie poster for that week’s feature, “Invaders from Mars.” It portrayed a boy my age, aghast at his bedroom window by the scene of a spaceship landing at midnight in an empty field behind his house.

There was really no need for scary movies then. We were already all frightened enough, and those who claimed they were not were lying. But perhaps as kids we were all looking for outlets for our fear, because the real story of politics and nuclear bombs made no sense to us at all. Scary movies became the in thing, and I couldn’t wait to see “Invaders from Mars.”

Thirty-five cents for admission was no challenge at all then. There were always a few soda bottles to be found, and a little rummaging through the easy chair where my father watched a worried-looking Walter Cronkite every night yielded bus fare, and, if I was lucky, enough for that week’s special matinee snack, a Mars Bar.

It rained that Saturday, so just about every kid stuck inside was given bus fare to go see “Invaders from Mars.” The movie was preceded by a few cartoons to quiet us down, then it began. You could hear a pin drop. All the anxiety we had pent up within us was about to play out on the screen.

After the spaceship landed in that field, the boy in the film fell asleep. In the morning, he wondered whether it was all a dream. At breakfast, his mother and father and brother were acting very strangely. At school, his teacher and fellow students were strange, too. As he investigated, the story brought him to an underground tunnel where Martian zombies took direction from a squid-like mastermind managing the takeover of everyone’s mind and soul from its protected glass sphere. Those who today say there is really nothing to fear didn’t live through the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was utterly terrified.

When the movie was over and the lights came on, the older kids who had been throwing popcorn at us all disappeared into the streets. The kids in the middle, who were all my age, sat silently traumatized as the curtain closed. “Invaders From Mars” scared the &#§@ out of us! By the time I came to my senses all the kids I knew had scattered. None wanted to be seen in the fits of fright with which they departed “Invaders from Mars.”

Father G circa 1962.

A Glorious Mystery

Out on a rainy, darkened Union Street in downtown Lynn, I had missed the bus. It would be an hour before another came, and I had a sudden intense longing for the safety of home. So I set out on foot to walk the two miles through the city streets as it grew dark. Even today, when I am feeling vulnerable, anxious and alone, I dream of that trek at age nine through the city streets at night.

As I walked home on that day, my imagination raced ahead of me, and I felt fragile and alone. I was on the edge of tears for an accumulation of reasons I could never articulate. At times, the reality of feeling vulnerable strikes hard. I knew there were no evil Martian zombies, but I had an ill-defined sense that evil had just paid our world a visit and it changed us. We lived in a dangerous world, then, and since then its danger has exponentially grown.

And so on into the rain I walked. I walked alone, through a part of the city kids like me didn’t usually venture into. The darkness grew — both in the skies above me and deep, deep within me. You know what I mean for at one time or another, you have been there too. All light had gone out of the world. All hope had been drained away. Then the torrent came.

I’m not sure which soaked me more, the rain or the tears. I rarely cried as a boy — it was just hell if my older brother ever saw me crying — but the rain was making me shiver. I cannot ever forget that day. When I looked behind me in the dim darkness, someone was following me. A dark figure in a raincoat who stopped whenever I stopped. I tried to run, and when I did, he ran too.

There on the downtown city street, about a mile from the movie theatre, I came upon the imposing, looming spires of Saint Joseph Catholic Church. We didn’t spend much time in churches when I was growing up. The church’s dark brick façade and immensity seemed to stretch into the rumbling clouds. It felt almost as scary as “Invaders from Mars” and that ominous figure stalking somewhere behind me.

But the rain kept coming, and I had no choice. I climbed the steep marble steps of Saint Joseph Church, and just as I got to the top to duck into an alcove, a massive door opened next to me, and scared whatever wits I had left right out of me. It was, of all people, a police officer. I looked back down the street and the stalker had fled. “Get out of the rain, kid!” barked the officer as he shuffled me through the door on his way out. “And say a prayer for me while you’re in there,” he commanded. So in I went, almost against my will.

The church was massive. I had received my First Communion there two years earlier, but had never been back since. In the dim lights, I walked toward the sanctuary, and at the Communion rail, I knelt. I looked back toward the church doors, but no one had followed me in. I was alone, but a sense of safety slowly came over me. At some point it struck me that the police officer had come in here to pray and that thought impressed and comforted me. So I stayed for awhile.

Then I saw her! The great carved image in the sanctuary before me was crowned with light, and she held a child in her arms as though presenting Him to me. She was incredibly beautiful, but it was the creature beneath her feet that really gripped my attention and wouldn’t let it go. I stared in utter wonder at what was subdued beneath her feet. It was ugly, and all too real. It looked like the creature in the glass sphere that so terrified me in “Invaders from Mars.” It was trapped under her feet — under a soul that magnified the Lord.

Then the Martians left me. The stalker in the street left me. The missiles, and Khrushchev, and the Cold War left me. I felt, more than saw, the light come back into my world. The pulsing sobs, now still felt but unheard, left me, and a vista of hope broke through the clouds of doubt and fear. The look on her face was radiant, and she spoke to me. It wasn’t in words. It was deep, deep in the very place where fear had gripped my soul. I could not take my eyes from what was subdued beneath her feet. “Trust!” she said, and “Peace be with you.” And it was.

On that day she lifted me up out of a pit. Then years later, when once we met again, she humbled me, and I needed that, too. I tried to write about this in “Listen to Our Mother: Mary and the Fatima Century” but my words could not really ever do her justice.

Sixty-two years have passed since that day. Well over a half century. On the wall of this prison cell is an image of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the patron saint of prisoners and writers and the patron of Beyond These Stone Walls and this imprisonment. He’s Pornchai Moontri’s patron, too, and this changed everything for him. Saint Maximilian’s feast day is August 14.

Next to him on our cell wall is that image, the one I saw at age nine. I don’t know where it came from. It appeared one day in a letter to Pornchai and went quickly up onto his wall. I wrote once of the images on our cell wall in “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”

Reason for hope is a very great gift. Never again let the sun go down on your fear. When the Glorious Mysteries seem too unworldly to fathom, then look beneath her feet. What is there will look very familiar to you, and you will know what it means. The key to resisting evil is trust that the strife may not yet be over, but the battle is already won.

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help
or sought your intercession,
was left unaided.
Inspired with this confidence,
I fly unto you,
O Virgin of virgins, my Mother;
to you do I come,
before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer them.
Amen.

— The Memorare, by Saint Bernard of Clairveaux

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Advent of the Mother of God

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Christmas in the Valley and on the High Places

On a Christmas morning buried in snow a young man in prison took a first trusting step from the valley of humiliation to seek the high places and a season of grace.

Christmas by Fr Gordon MacRae

’Twas the night before Christmas, 2007, when a winter storm descended upon Concord, New Hampshire. I awoke that Christmas morning to a shroud of heavy snow that masked this prison world of concrete and steel under pristine whiteness. A howling wind encased the walled prison yard in drifts of snow while saner men hibernated through the long, cold Christmas trapped inside.

I don’t know what came over me that Christmas morning. By 9:00 AM my claustrophobia was in high gear. Still a source of anxiety after all these years, it reached its usual crescendo with a near panic-driven urge to be outside. Prisoners here have a brief hourly window to move from point A to point B, but it was Christmas. We were snowed in, and there was simply no place to go. But I had to try.

Our friend, Pornchai Moontri had been here with me for about two years then, and we had just landed in the same place. “Where are you going?” he asked as he saw me bundled up against the wind and the snow. I told him I wanted to get an hour outside and asked if he wanted to join me. “Brrrrr!” he shivered, shaking his head. So I boldly made my way alone to a guard station to ask if the outside yard might be open. “Are you nuts?” came the gruff reply.

Thinking it a rhetorical question, I just stood there. The guard grabbed some keys and I followed him outside to a caged in area buried in snow drifts. “You’ll be stuck out here for an hour,” he said as the gate closed behind me and a key engaged the frozen lock with grinding reluctance.

And I thought prison was only hostile on the inside! The wind was howling, snow was blowing wildly, and it was freezing. The yard was empty except for an old picnic table half buried in snow, and a solitary downcast hooded figure sitting there like a silent sentinel. He kept a wary eye on me as I decided to give him a wide berth and walk the perimeter of the yard through the drifts of snow. Had I taken in the scene a little sooner, I might have changed my mind and headed back inside.

Battling the drifts got old really fast, so I made my way through the snow to the opposite side of the table, cleared a wet section of bench, and sat down. His bare, freezing hands were balled into fists and his hooded stare fought against eye contact. It was up to me to break the ice. Literally!

My own wariness lifted as the balled fists and attempts to look fierce were betrayed by streaks of tears interrupted by my uninvited presence. There were over 500 prisoners in that building, and I had never before seen this menacing but frightened kid. So I asked his name. “James,” he said through a struggle to sound gruff.

I noticed that James’ fists were tightly balled not because he was planning to smack me, but because his hands were freezing. The two-dollar gloves sold to us back then were next to useless against the cold so I was wearing two pairs. I quietly removed the outer gloves and handed them over. It’s against the rules here to give a freezing fellow human a used pair of gloves, but it was long ago. The statute of limitations for that offense has likely expired. I doubt they’ll throw me in prison for it.

James stared at the gloves for a moment of silent defiance, then quickly put them on. There was no holding back what I sensed was coming next. His face fell into his newly gloved hands, and I spent the rest of that hour a cold silent witness to this young man’s torrent of grief. Then the guard appeared to ask whether I was ready to come back in. “No, I’m good,” I said. “I’ll stay for another hour.”

Though I Walk Through the Valley of Shadow

James, it turned out, did not even know it was Christmas. At 21, he had never before been in prison. He arrived just weeks earlier, and on the morning of Christmas Eve he was moved from the receiving unit to the eight-man cells on the top floor of that prison building. He had been there only a day and one overnight when we met that cold Christmas morning in the snow.

In the midst of tears, James asked, “Why would they put someone like me up there?” By “someone like me,” he seemed to mean that life for him was a lot more fragile than for most young men his age in prison. James is part African-American, part Asian, and part God-knows-what. In the racially sensitive world of prison, he did not feel like a comfortable fit anywhere. He had been assigned to a tough place where practiced predators zeroed in quickly upon his inner vulnerability.

James entered young adulthood with an acute social anxiety disorder and panic attacks. This, coupled with severe ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — made him stand out here as a marginal figure among marginal figures. “I can’t go back up there,” he sobbed. I told him that refusing to go might have consequences that would only make the matter worse. I told him that it was very difficult to get anything done about his plight on a Christmas morning. So I made a precarious promise that from the moment I made it I wondered if it could actually happen. I promised to try to get him moved to a safer, saner place.

So later that day I spoke discreetly with someone in a position to help. I explained what took place, and he said, “I’ll look into it.” Just hours later on that Christmas afternoon, I saw James out the window carrying his meager belongings to the cellblock next to the one where I lived. I knew most of the men there, so I passed the word to go easy on him. They did. It was Christmas, after all.

When you rescue someone lost at sea, a sort of bond forms of its own accord. I eventually learned of all the baggage in life that brought James to that Christmas day. Like many who land in prison, James was missing most of the infrastructure of a life that might help prevent such a thing. He was like a tree without roots, swaying into whatever direction the winds of life blew.

I learned over time that James was removed from his home as a young child because of a history of abuse and neglect. He grew up in the foster care system, moving from place to place, even state to state. Not many people could cope with his racing thoughts, lack of control, and craving for attention.

From age ten to seventeen, James had been in six foster homes, some better than others, but none leaving him with a foundation and a sense of family. At age 17 he simply walked out the door, emancipating himself to the streets where life descended on a steady downward spiral.

James’ crime was as bizarre and misunderstood as the rest of his life. Having broken into a vacant building for a place to sleep, he fled as a police officer approached him. The chase ended in a scuffle, and on the way to the ground, the officer’s weapon fell from his holster. James picked it up. What happened next is a matter of controversy. Some, including the officer, thought James was pointing the gun at him. Others, including James, say he was just a panic-stricken kid trying to give it back.

Either way, just a month before this incident, a terrible tragedy occurred in Manchester, New Hampshire that, justly or not, became a frame of reference for James’ offense. A career police officer, Michael Briggs, was shot and killed in the line of duty by a young, African American man who is today the sole prisoner on New Hampshire’s death row.

I once wrote about that tragedy and its aftermath in the life of John Breckinridge, Officer Briggs’ partner who was present in that Manchester alley on that night. John Breckinridge himself wrote courageously of his new opposition to the death penalty based on his recent reversion to his Catholic faith. But James was also a part of the fallout of that story. His fumbling crime of picking up an officer’s dropped weapon resulted in a ten year sentence.

Hinds’ Feet on High Places

I have served that sentence with him. Most people here find it very difficult to be around James for any length of time. When James discovered that I am a Catholic priest, he thought little of it. “I was Catholic in one of my foster homes,” he said. It was an odd way of phrasing the only religious experience he has ever had in his young, unpredictable life. “You’re like my father now,” he said. “You’re the only person I feel safe with.”

I got James a part-time job in the prison library where he earned a dollar a day. He helped return books and put them back on the shelves. Sometimes, he even put them back in the right place. He seemed to think that the rest of his job description was to make certain that everyone else knew he was my friend.

James was released a few years ago. On another Christmas morning, a decade after that sorrowful mystery of our first Christmas encounter, I spent another Christmas morning with James — that time at a Mass to honor the Birth of Christ the King. The tears of sorrow in the bitter cold that life dealt him were gone. He smiled a lot then, perhaps too much for a young man in prison. He didn’t even realize that all my other friends vie for space to make sure James sat on the other side of me so none of them had to sit with him. He smiled and fidgeted and tried to get my attention all through Mass, but I’ll take that over the oppression of bitterness and sorrow any day.

I had an odd experience with James shortly after that Mass. During a quieter moment in the prison library, James asked me if I remembered the first time we met. I told him that I remembered it very well, that it was Christmas morning nearly a decade earlier. James said, “I was in a real deep, dark place then. Now I feel like I’m in the high places.”

What he said reminded me vividly of a strange book I read fify years ago, Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. It was first published by Christian Literature Crusade in 1955, but I read it in 1975. At the time, I was a Capuchin novice preparing for simple profession of vows, and I came across the book “by accident” on a shelf one day. It was fascinating. Hannah Hurnard was a native of London who became an Evangelical missionary in Palestine and Israel for fifty years.

Hinds’ Feet on High Places is a small allegorical novel (158 pp) about the spiritual journey. The central character is a young woman named “Much Afraid” who heard a call to leave the Valley of Humiliation where she lived imprisoned. She wanted to journey to the High Places of the Chief Shepherd, and was accompanied on her difficult journey by two other allegorical characters, Suffering and Sorrow. At the end of the journey she was transformed with a new life and a new name. It’s an odd, quirky, but beautiful novel. Fifty years later, I remembered every character and facet of the book.

On the day after James made me think of it back then, Pornchai-Max Moontri handed me something he received in the mail that day from our friend and BTSW reader, Mike Fazzino in Connecticut. It was the Winter 2016 issue of GrayFriar News, the quarterly newsletter of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the order founded by the late Father Benedict Goeschel, CFR. For perspective, I once wrote of him when I too was lost in shadow in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”

The cover of the newsletter had an excellent article by Father John Paul Ouellette, CFR, entitled “The Humility of Christ Is Coming Down Joyfully for Others.” In it, Father Ouellette cited Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places:

“A surprising character plays an important role in the transformation of Much Afraid: the water that flows down from the heights to the depths. As it makes its way down the mountain, the water constantly sings, ‘from the heights we leap and go, to the valley down below, always answering the call to the lowest place of all!’”

That’s what Christmas is. It is Christ descending from the heights to the lowest place of all. That Christmas morning in the freezing cold with James is now like a ghost of Christmas past. I’m re-reading Hinds’ Feet on High Places now, fifty years after picking it up for the first time. It’s a Christmas gift given for the second time.

For Christ to call James out of the depths to the heights, someone had to go down to that valley to meet him there. As Father Ouellete concludes from his analogy of the living water leaping from the heights, “Humility is not only a coming down, but doing so joyfully.” The joyful part has been missing for me, but I’m working on it. The key is knowing that Christ has come, and when you enter the Valley of Humiliation, you will only have to stay long enough to journey with someone else to the high places.

Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains, and the mountains in reply echo back their joyous strains: “Gloria in Excelcis Deo! Gloria in Excelsis Deo!”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You might also like these related Advent and Christmas posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.

The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope

Christmas for Those Bowed Down by the Fatigue of this World

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

How December 25 Became Christmas

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

How Our Lady of Guadalupe Came to Us in Prison

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the setting for a profound story of how Mother Mary sought out two sons in darkness and led them to the light of Divine Mercy.

December 11, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

“The Marians believe Mary chose this particular group of inmates to be the first. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri.”

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ by Felix Carroll

This story describes a most unlikely series of events in a most unlikely place. Some of it has been told in these pages before, but putting theses threads together in one place creates an inspiring tapestry of Divine Mercy. I first began writing about this several years ago at the conclusion of a six-week retreat program in the New Hampshire State Prison.

Over the summer of 2019, Pornchai Moontri and I were asked to take part, for a second time, in the Divine Mercy retreat, 33 Days to Morning Glory by Marian Fr Michael Gaitley. It was offered here in the summer months amid lots of competing activities. The organizers needed 15 participants to host the retreat, but only 13 signed up. So Pornchai and I were to be “the filler.”

We ended up benefitting greatly from the ‘retreat,’ and I think we also contributed much to the other participants. At the end of it, one of the retreat facilitators, Andy Bashelor turned to Pornchai and said “I want you to know that I saw your conversion story. It is the most powerful story I have ever read.” I wrote of this in “Eric Mahl and Pornchai Moontri: A Lesson in Freedom.”

But before returning to that story, I want to revisit something that happened several months before it was posted. Late in the afternoon of December 11, 2018, I was at my desk in the prison Law Library where I use two computer systems side by side. Neither can be used for my own work. I still write posts on an old typewriter.

One computer at my work desk connects directly to Lexis Nexus, a legal database that all law libraries have. The other connects to the prison library system database. As I was shutting down the computers before leaving for the day, I decided to change the background screen on that second computer. For the previous several years it was a graphic image of our Galaxy with a little “You Are Here” arrow pointing to a tiny dot in the cosmos that depicted our solar system. It made me feel somewhat insignificant.

I had but moments left before rushing out the door at 3:00 PM. I called up a list of background screens which displayed only hundreds of numbered graphic files with no way to view them. So I decided to just pick a number — there were pages of them — and get what I get. Then I shut down the system without seeing it.

The next morning, December 12, I arrived at my desk and booted up the computer for work. The image that filled my screen is the one you see here. It’s a magnificent mural in Mexico City. I was not yet even conscious of the date. On the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, blindly chosen from a thousand random numbers, she appeared on my screen and has been there ever since.

I was not always conscious of any spiritual connection with Mary. Her sphere of influence in my life was first directed to Pornchai Moontri. The segment from Marian Helper magazine atop this post attests to that. I wrote of it in “Fr Seraphim Michalenko on a Mission of Divine Mercy.”

A Mystery in Her Eyes

But back, for a moment, to Our Lady of Guadalupe which became my favorite among all the Marian images I have come to reverence. Its origin is fascinating. Nearly five centuries ago, on the morning of December 12, 1531, young Juan Diego, an early Aztec convert to Catholicism in the New World, was walking at the foot of Tepayac Hill outside Mexico City.

Days earlier in the same location, Juan Diego heard the beautiful voice of a lady, but saw no one. On this day, she appeared. She instructed Juan Diego to build a church on that spot. She then told him to gather up in his tilma — a shawl that was commonly worn at the time — a bunch of Castillian roses that appeared nearby. Castillian roses were never in bloom in December, but there they were. He was told to bring these to the local bishop.

When Juan Diego removed his tilma in the presence of the bishop and a group of people with him, he and they were surprised to see the roses. But they were stunned to also see imprinted in the tilma an amazing image of a beautiful young woman surrounded by the rays of the Sun with the crescent moon under her feet, surrounded by roses and with angels attending her. The woman had asked Juan Diego to tell the bishop that she is “Coatloxopeuh,” which in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, means “The One Who Crushes the Serpent.”

Juan Diego’s tilma, a garment of the poor, was made of coarse fiber completely unsuitable for painting. Since 1666, the tilma image has been studied by artists and scientists who have been unable to explain how the image became incorporated into the very fibers of the tilma. The shawl is the only one of its kind still in existence after nearly 500 years. It is enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

Hundreds of years later, in 1929, a photographer revealed that when he enlarged photographs of the Lady’s face on the tilma, other images appeared to be in her eyes. In 1979, scientist and engineer, Dr. Jose Aste Tousman, studied the tilma using more sophisticated imaging equipment enlarging her eyes 2,500 times.

After filtering and processing the images using computers, it was discovered that the Lady’s two eyes contain another imprint — the image of the bishop and several other people staring at the tilma apparently at the moment Juan Diego presented it in 1531. It was a permanent imprint equally appearing upon the retinas of both eyes in stereoscopic vision. It appeared to be what Our Lady of Guadalupe saw when Juan Diego first presented his mysterious tilma to the bishop.

On January 26, 1979, Pope John Paul II offered Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe before an overflow crowd of 300,000. Years later, St. Juan Diego was canonized by him. Now, seemingly by random “accident,” that image is enshrined on the computer screen in the place where I work each day in prison. The mathematical odds against this happening are as astronomical as the odds against the image itself.

Her Summons to Pornchai Moontri

The icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe is now also on the wall of my cell. It has been widely accepted by many as a representation of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Moon Under Her Feet” as described in the Book of Revelation (12:1). In the Mystical City of God, Venerable Mary of Agreda discerned that evil greatly fears this image, and flees from it.

Both Sacred Scripture and Catholic Tradition are filled with accounts of good men and women who suffer terrible ordeals only to be transformed into great men and women. I told the devastating story of how Pornchai Moontri came into my life in 2005 and all that he endured before and after in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”

Seemingly by some mysteriously Guiding Hand, the events of both our lives steered us toward the point of our being in the same place at the same time and meeting. After all that Pornchai had suffered in life, he would never have trusted me, an accused Catholic priest, if not for a series of articles that Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Pornchai read them and was moved that he has met a friend whose life had been unjustly shattered in almost equal measure to his own. It was then that he made a decision to do something he had never done before, to trust.

In 2007, the next catastrophe in his life took place. After fifteen years in prison, many of them in the cruel torment of solitary confinement, Pornchai was ordered by a U.S. Immigration Judge to be deported to his native Thailand upon completion of his sentence. Pornchai despaired about the prospect of one day being left alone in a country of only vague memories, a country from which he was taken against his will as a young abandoned child.

I told Pornchai in 2007 that we will have to build a bridge to Thailand. He scoffed at this, saying that it was impossible to do from a prison. Then the first sections of the bridge began to be laid out. This was two years before this blog began in 2009. First, Mrs. LaVern West, a retired librarian in Cincinnati, Ohio also read those WSJ articles and began corresponding with me.

In a return letter, I mentioned my friendship with Pornchai and the challenges we faced. LaVern began researching and printing rudimentary lessons of Thai language and culture and sending them to Pornchai who began to study them. One of the lessons mentioned a Thai language series produced by Paiboon Publishers, a Thai language bookseller in California. So I wrote to them. Pornchai had not heard Thai spoken since before he became a homeless 13 year old lost in America.

Paiboon Publishers donated a set of Thai language DVDs to the prison library for the exclusive use of Pornchai to study Thai several hours per week. He quickly became proficient in the spoken language of his early childhood. Reading and writing in Thai, however, were simply beyond his grasp. Mine too.

We both gave learning the Thai writing system a serious effort, but it seems just a complex series of squiggles beyond the capacity of most Western adult minds to assimilate. Pornchai reads and writes fluently in English, however, which in Thailand is an asset.

In 2008, the Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights published “Pornchai’s Story” as the conversion story of 2008. In 2009, Beyond These Stone Walls began, and I also began a quest to make our presence known in Thailand. Dilia E. Rodriguez, PhD told the story of the development of this blog in “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It conveys how this blog impacted both my life and Pornchai’s in prison, and of how it reached a global readership including throughout Asia.

Also across the globe in Australia, attorney Clare Farr read of us and began an investigation into the life of Pornchai in both Thailand and the State of Maine.

My efforts to reach out to Thailand at first seemed to no avail. Everything written and mailed from prison bears a disclaimer stamped on our envelopes declaring that the contents were written and mailed from prison. With only a few exceptions, my letters to anyone I thought might help us were met with silence. Meanwhile, Pornchai was brought into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010. This resulted in several articles and a chapter in the book, Loved, Lost, Found, by Marian Helper Editor, Felix Carroll. That chapter is reprinted here with permission entitled Pornchai Moontri: Mercy Inside Those Stone Walls.

The book was especially powerful, and it made its way to Bangkok where it was read by a prominent group of Catholics who founded a Divine Mercy mission and ministry there.

My Surrender to Her Fiat

I gradually became aware that what I once thought and hoped was a Great Tapestry of God designed to rescue me was really designed to rescue Pornchai Moontri, and I was but an instrument in a Divinely inspired Script. It became increasingly clear to me why Mary sent another of her spiritual sons, St Maximilian Kolbe, into our lives.

I came to understand in my heart and soul that I am to emulate what he did. I am to offer my life — or at least my freedom — for the salvation of another prisoner upon whom Mary has placed the safety of her mantle. I wrote of this recently in “The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe.” This is how we got to where we are.

Pornchai’s survival has taken on a life of its own as a result of our growing years of trust in Divine Mercy. The Divine Mercy Thailand group conveyed its readiness to help me prepare Pornchai for his eventual reassimilation to Thailand. They were on the other end of what seemed to us just a black hole up to that point. They embraced Pornchai and provided him with housing and support upon his arrival after a 36 year absence from Thailand. Our Lady lifted from us both an enormous burden of hopelessness.

Late on the night of November 22, 2019, I watched on EWTN as Pope Francis was greeted in Thailand in a beautiful ceremony as Thai Catholics in a predominantly Buddhist culture sang for him like an angelic choir. I realized I will be handing Pornchai over to them in a matter of months, and I could not contain my emotions any longer. As Pornchai was fast asleep late at night in the prison bunk above, as I watched Pope Francis being received in Thailand, I began to cry.

I do not know where our long road turns next, but what started as tears of loss and sorrow that night were also tears of triumph. They were the tears of St. Joseph, summoned to a Fatherhood he never envisioned but from which he would never retreat. Through grace, and the gifts of powerful advocates in Heaven and on Earth, we did all this from inside a prison cell in Concord, New Hampshire. At every turn I heard Mary’s Fiat to Divine Providence: “Be it done to me according to Thy Word.”

The beautiful and miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was placed on our cell wall for Pornchai. Now it remains there still, for me.

O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Note: We posted a companion to this post at our Voices from Beyond Page on the day before this post is published: “Thomas Merton and Pornchai Moontri Meet in the City of Angels.”

For more on the mysterious presence of Mary in our lives, please visit “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

And for the future Mary promised: “Thailand’s Once-Lost Son was Flag Bearer at the Asian Apostolic Congress on Mercy.”

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